Rape gang gaslighting must end - Labour offer little hope to grooming survivors

Rigged from the start is how one rape gang survivor described the Government's long-overdue and now stumbling investigation into the national grooming scandal. With several survivors having withdrawn amid fears they have become political footballs, the inquiry is in crisis - ironically just as new allegations explode. Evidence is mounting of a widespread cover-up of grooming gang activity in the nation's capital with girls as young as nine trafficked for sexual abuse. The Daily Express and MyLondon have been at the forefront in overturning repeated denials by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and the Metropolitan Police as to the extent of the scandal.

The last 48 hours have seen the issue explode into the public consciousness as a result of this paper's campaigning. And, I suspect, politicians are going to discover once again that hiding the truth from the public only makes things worse. To say the cover up is worse than the crime is not appropriate in this case, but it's certainly not going to make the truth any easier. The Mayor has long denied rape gangs are operating in London but evidence is mounting of the widespread exploitation of young women, including many children. Victims who have spoken to the Express say constant denials are simply gaslighting them.

Last week, under pressure from the Express, the Metropolitan Police performed a screeching U-turn on the issue and have finally reopened 9,000 cases of suspected abuse over the last 15 years. Numerous teenagers testified that older men have plied them with drugs and alcohol so they can be exploited by sex gangs.

Over the last year, the Met has identified even more cases of child sex exploitation. For a long time, the police and London councils managed to avoid the definition of "grooming gangs" by logging incidents as "organised crime networks".

Notoriously, the rape gangs of Rochdale and Rotherham as well as other towns throughout the UK, were able to operate because the authorities, from police to social services and local politicians, were afraid of being labelled "racist" if they identified the predominant ethnic identity of the gangs. Has that happened in London? It may be too early to know but certainly it's a question that needs answering - and fast.

The fact is there is a racist element to this national scandal and it's coming from the perpetrators. Katie Lam MP shocked fellow parliamentarians by quoting from a 13-year old victim who was a told by her Asian rapist that: "We're here to f*** all the white girls and f*** the government."

"There are very good reasons to believe that these crimes were both racially and religiously aggravated and motivated," Lam said. There is no point trying to sanitise it. The term "grooming gangs" has frequently been used as a euphemism for rape gangs. And the majority of those prosecuted are Muslims of Pakistani heritage.

Embarrassed Western liberalism has allowed this sort of behaviour to thrive in the dark corners of our cities because left-wingers deem "racism" to be an even greater crime than allowing vulnerable young women to be sacrificed on the altar of woke.

It is shameful that this wrong-headed ideology is even proving to be a hindrance to the national inquiry set up by Labour, as safe-guarding minister Jess Phillips sought to broaden its scope away from racially aggravated crimes. One of the survivors believed this had all the qualities of a "cover-up" and resigned from the advisory council.

Reform leader Nigel Farage this week called the inquiry "dead in the water" and asked Parliament to step in - with the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle heading the investigation.

This would remove the investigation from an ideologically-driven government, both politicians and civil servants, who are compromised by their slavish devotion to anti-racism and wokeism - both key issues that allowed the scandal to fester for so long and ruin so many young lives in the first place.

Unless our government and police recognise these crimes for what they are, they will never get to the heart of what motivates the perpetrators. It is urgent that this is done quickly and with full publicity. The sense of cover-up is too ingrained for government and local authorities to regain the full confidence of the British public.

In the past, mass migration was sometimes necessary to maintain our public services, but in recent years the uncontrolled nature of it, especially illegal migration, has allowed foreign values, some of them malevolent, to take root in parts of our country.

Vulnerable young women have paid a heavy price for this and the national inquiry should make that clear. But there seems little hope of that if an utterly compromised Labour government remains in charge of the investigation.